Water is irreplaceable natural resources on the planet for people to survival and develop. Declining water quality has become a global issue of significant concern as anthropogenic activities expand and climate change threatens to cause major alterations to the hydrological cycle. Thus, monitoring the physical, chemical, and biological status of rivers, reservoirs, lakes, coastal waters, and oceans is immensely important. Remote sensing has the potential to provide an invaluable complementary source of data at local to global scales. This book—Water Optics and Water Colour Remote Sensing—provides an overview of the current state of the science on water optical properties and water colour remote sensing monitoring. Overall, the book presents a variety of applications at the global scale (with case studies in Europe, Asia, South and North America, and the Antarctic), achieved with different remote sensing instruments, such as hyperspectral field and airborne sensors, ocean colour radiometry, geostationary platforms, and the multispectral Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellites.The book is aimed at a wide audience, ranging from the graduate students, university teachers and the working scientists to policy makers and managers. Efforts have been made to highlight general principles as well as the site-specific application in the field of water optics and water colour remote sensing.

Recently, growing interest in the use of remote sensing imagery has appeared to provide synoptic maps of water quality parameters in coastal and inner water ecosystems;, monitoring of complex land ecosystems for biodiversity conservation; precision agriculture for the management of soils, crops, and pests; urban planning; disaster monitoring, etc. However, for these maps to achieve their full potential, it is important to engage in periodic monitoring and analysis of multi-temporal changes. In this context, very high resolution (VHR) satellite-based optical, infrared, and radar imaging instruments provide reliable information to implement spatially-based conservation actions. Moreover, they enable observations of parameters of our environment at greater broader spatial and finer temporal scales than those allowed through field observation alone. In this sense, recent very high resolution satellite technologies and image processing algorithms present the opportunity to develop quantitative techniques that have the potential to improve upon traditional techniques in terms of cost, mapping fidelity, and objectivity. Typical applications include multi-temporal classification, recognition and tracking of specific patterns, multisensor data fusion, analysis of land/marine ecosystem processes and environment monitoring, etc. This book aims to collect new developments, methodologies, and applications of very high resolution satellite data for remote sensing. The works selected provide to the research community the most recent advances on all aspects of VHR satellite remote sensing.